Yet again, the radical Left has infiltrated a protest and ruined it

The movement sparked by the death of George Floyd has been hijacked by a very familiar crew

Hands up everybody who was shocked to hear that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement had been taken over by the hard-Left. Can I see some BBC researchers waving at the back of the room? Welcome to the world as some of us have known it for a long time.

There is nothing at all surprising here: this is just what happens to pretty much any protest that grabs the public imagination. All it takes is a flurry of headlines and a few choice spots on the broadcast news and your cause is a prime candidate for infiltration by the people who attach the same label to everything that attracts socially acceptable opprobrium: all forms of injustice, suffering or potential damage can be attributed to the original sin of capitalism (or imperialism, which is just an export version of the profit motive).

This process of infiltration has been the deliberate policy of Left-wing militancy since my grandmother’s day. She was a Communist Party member in the Thirties. As a sewing machine operator in the Jewish rag trade during the American Depression, she became a trade unionist and then a party activist. When my father was a boy, he was sent along to meetings of book clubs and community organisations with innocent-sounding apolitical names, which were actually front groups designed to educate the young in the proper doctrine. He stopped attending, he once told me, when he realised that it was the same handful of people running all these various activities – and that the arguments they were pitching were pretty much identical in every context. Most of these organisations had, almost certainly, once been what their names still proclaimed them to be – promoters of local interests or pastimes – before they were hollowed out and turned into propaganda organs for what was then the Stalinist Soviet regime.

By the time I reached my own youthful stage of political activism, the practice was called “entryism” and it was Trotsky who was the hero, not Stalin. But the principle was the same: we were advised not only to join and impact the direction of any influential new movement that appeared on the scene, but even, if we were really up for lifelong dedication, to make a permanent professional commitment to the process. In New-Left circles in the late Sixties and early Seventies, it was commonplace for members of International Socialism, which was the earlier incarnation of the Socialist Workers’ Party, to resign their membership in order to join Labour – because in those days, before James Callaghan changed the rules on entryism, you could not be a member of both at the same time. They would then run for the local council and exert as much control as possible over their borough’s political stance. (You may recall the Vietcong flags that occasionally flew over Labour town halls.) Other International Socialism members we knew took on jobs as trade union officials, some of whom I believe remain in post. But most committed activists just stayed in whatever employment they could find that was reasonably congenial (there were lots of them in the print trades and in academic life) and gave over their spare time to the radical cause in any number of guises.

So when I heard that Joshua Virasami, a leader and vociferous spokesman of the UK BLM movement, had declared that capitalism was terrorism, and that the police, who represented state terrorism, should be defunded – and further, that he had previously chained himself to fellow activists outside a London airport on the grounds that global climate change was racist, I thought, ah yes… here we are again. Then came the scramble of various organisations that should have been less naive (or might at least have spent 10 minutes doing some intensive googling) to dissociate themselves from the more absurd demands being put forward in the name of BLM. The BBC – obviously – was most prominent, advising its presenters to divest themselves of BLM badges on air. Then there were various Premier League football teams and some sports commentators from Sky TV… well, you know the rest.

The whole phenomenon managed in the end to be both ludicrous and sad. It had begun with a genuinely tragic event which was eminently worthy of protest: the killing of an unarmed black man by a white policeman while fellow officers stood by and watched. Even though it took place in another country, it was so horrifying that public demonstrations of outrage seemed perfectly understandable. There was nothing unreasonable about George Floyd’s death being used as a symbol of bigotry and racial injustice throughout the world.

It all went horribly wrong when the agitators moved in and started shooting their mouths off. But stupidity, incoherence and opportunism are always with us. The truly culpable players in this game are the tag-along media and celebrity hangers-on who are so guileless that they facilitate the corrupting of a legitimate protest movement by political manipulation. So, what is this all about in the minds of those amateur – or professional – infiltrators? Surely they are not consciously malign: simply subverting good causes for the sheer hell of it?

No, reader, this is not just nihilism or puerile mischief. If you have bought the Marxist package (or the faux Marxist one that now seems to be the only version available) you actually, sincerely believe that capitalism – the profit motive – is the cause of every social tragedy. Instead of seeing free market economics as a great liberator – having delivered mass prosperity, and the self-determination that follows from it, on a scale that is unprecedented in human history – you regard it as the enslavement of one class (or race) by another. And if you honestly believe that, then you see it as your moral duty to make use of every vehicle available for telling this story to the benighted mob who have been tricked into a state of false consciousness by their exploiters.

This is the great lie that made possible one of the most successful tyrannies in modern history. It still needs to be challenged and deconstructed over and over again.

They see it as their moral duty to make use of every vehicle available for pushing Marxism on the benighted mob who have been tricked into swallowing capitalism